Because We're Pinoy

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

I know a lot of teachers in both public and private schools who are not good in English. I wonder how on earth they are going to educate the children if they lack the necessary skills to mold those young and hungry minds.

Apparently, something is wrong and something must be done. It is not enough that we teach them about nouns and pronouns. We must plant the seed by encouraging them and by letting them see the importance of having good communication skills. The first thing to do is to be a living example.

It is ridiculous if an English teacher does not know how many p's the word apple has like my teacher in Elementary.

I can't stress enough the importance of having good communication skills, or having broad knowledge in English which is the universal language. This is important in business, schools, works and in almost every aspect.

But it seems that we have this "take it for granted approach" to this issue. We take pride of the recognition that Philippines is the best English-speaking country in Asia, but perhaps time would come when other Asian countries would beat us. Both education and the people are responsible for this. The former is not good enough and the latter is not interested enough.

Let me be more harsh this time. I see plain stupidity among us. When we hear a kid speaking in English, we would say: " Oh such a little cute child, he's very smart".

But if we hear a young lady doing the same we would say: " Arte! Trying hard.".

The truth is we envy those who can speak well in English, but instead of showing appreciation we criticize them because again some of us are crabs.

But when we are in a situation that requires us to use the language like job interview...we sweat, we tremble and we utter the names of all the saints alphabetically.